Reza Aslan Quotes

Islam doesn't promote violence or peace. Islam is just a religion, and like every religion in the world, it depends on what you bring to it. If you're a violent person, your Islam, your Judaism, your Christianity, your Hinduism, is going to be violent.

Islamophobia has become so mainstream in this country that Americans have been trained to expect violence against Muslims - not excuse it, but expect it. And that's happened because you have an Islamophobia industry in this country devoted to making Americans think there's an enemy within.

Bill Maher is right to condemn religious practices that violate fundamental human rights. Religious communities must do more to counter extremist interpretations of their faith. But failing to recognize that religion is embedded in culture — and making a blanket judgment about the world’s second largest religion — is simply bigotry.

Religion doesn't make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.

If you ask a Saudi Imam why women in Saudi Arabia can't drive, he'll say, 'Because Islam demands it.' But that's absurd, because - first of all - Islam demands no such thing; and secondly, the only country in the world in which women can't drive is Saudi Arabia. The inability to understand the difference between a cultural practice and religious belief is shocking among self-described intellectuals.

Religion is, by definition, interpretation; and by definition, all interpretations are valid. However, some interpretations are more reasonable than others.

Islam is more than a religion, it's much more than a religion, it's a way of life, it is a one party political system that has a very elaborate legal system that can put you to death if you leave it.

It took many years to cleanse Arabia of its “false idols.” It will take many more to cleanse Islam of its new false idols-bigotry and fanaticism-worshipped by those who have replaced Muhammad's original vision of tolerance and unity with their own ideals of hatred and discord. But the cleansing is inevitable, and the tide of reform cannot be stopped. The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it.

Over the last few years, the Islamic world has produced more female presidents and prime ministers than both Europe and North America combined.

I believe in God, which means I am open to some absurd possibilities. But I understand the power of that faith, and I understand the metaphor of that belief.

As with all journeys, the Way has an end, though it should not be imagined as a straight road leading to a fixed destination but rather as a majestic mountain whose peak conceals the presence of God. There are, of course, many paths to the summit-some better than others. But because every path eventually leads to the same destination, which path one takes is irrelevant.

But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason you were brought into Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you might know me better there.

[Islam] is the dynamic conviction that a person's spiritual and worldly responsibilities are one and the same, that an individuals duty to the community is indistinguishable from his or her duty to God.

The people on the streets of Egypt and Tunisia and Libya and Syria and Iran have done more to defeat the ideology of Al Qaeda than anything that the United States has done. They have shown that there is a third way, that with peaceful protest you can have an end to dictatorship and a role for human dignity, a role for your religious faith in society.

Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made language to express those feelings.

Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith.

I really believe that to have a full impression of Jesus, both as Christ as a man, you must know about the world that gave shape to him - the world out of which he arose.

Im a person of faith, and the language that I use to define my faith, the symbols and metaphors that I rely upon to express my faith, are those provided by Islam because they make the most sense to me.

God doesn't make you a bigot. You're just a bigot.

The west is very concerned and actually afraid because the media is not informing them. There are too many moderate Muslims who are trying to whitewash the fears and concerns of the West. It's time for us to face reality - nobody is against Muslims. When I'm speaking about this situation, it's about Islamic doctrine. Islamic doctrine promotes violence and hatred against non Muslims. 60% of the Koran is dedicated to cursing and spreading hatred and violence against non-Muslims who are called 'Kaffir'.

The key to recognizing who Jesus was is to recognize this fundamental truth: He was a Jew.

When you forcefully suppress religious nationalism, you radicalize it.

When you're a brown Muslim from Iran talking about Jesus on TV, you need to keep your cool at all times, OK? That's not rocket science.

Should I act violently in defense of my religion, absolutely.

I have to say that it's a weird feeling to have to respond to a Christian leader of an anti-Muslims organisation - it would be like having to respond to a Muslim leader of an anti-Jewish organisation about Judaism so the whole thing is kind of weird. Let me just say it's kind of convenient to simply pick and choose whatever violent bits and pieces one finds in the Koran and ignore the equally important versus that talk about compassion and peace.

There is absolutely no difference between religion and politics at all in Jesus' time. In other words, every seemingly religious word that came out of Jesus' mouth had very clear and unmistakable political connotations to it.

We have to remember that the United States has certain principles, certain values that bind us all together, that make us all American. And if we allow those values, those rights to be rescinded for one group of individuals, then we are essentially opening the door to having all of our rights, all of our privileges rescinded.

For an academic to launch a public conversation about journalistic integrity, the role of religion in society, scholarship and faith is a dream come true. These are the kinds of things that we sit around talking to each other about in our dusty libraries. To see these conversations take place in popular culture is the best thing that could have ever happened.

Indonesia, women are absolutely 100 percent equal to men

Well, to be clear, I am a scholar of religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament and fluency in Biblical Greek who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two decades who also happens to be Muslim.

But perhaps the most important innovation in the doctrine of jihad was its outright prohibition of all but strictly defensive wars. “Fight in the way of God those who fight you,” the Quran says, “but do not begin hostilities; God does not like the aggressor” (2:190). Elsewhere the Quran is more explicit: “Permission to fight is given only to those who have been oppressed ... who have been driven from their homes for saying, 'God is our Lord' ” (22:39; emphasis added).

In times of economic distress, it's only natural for people - and Americans have done this for many years - to look for a scapegoat. Depending on where you live in this country, the scapegoats are either, frankly, Mexicans or Muslims. So, you know, God save you if you happened to be a Mexican Muslim in America right now.

What's happened in the United States is something that has already happened in Europe and that is that Islam is become 'otherised', it has become a kind of receptacle into which fears and anxieties about the political or economic situation, about the changing racial landscape of this country are being thrown.

The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is “What do these stories mean?

The idea that education will lead to a lessening of bigotry is just factually incorrect.

You can be a follower of Jesus and not necessarily be a Christian.

The religiously observant is lumped in with the nominal Muslim, the nominal Muslim is lumped in with the non-Muslim and the radical. If we want to make sense of this mess and stop pushing Muslims into the arms of the extremist, we need to make meaningful distinctions between the religion of Islam that a billion Muslims follow and see as a guidance as a peaceful righteous moral life and the puritanical Islam of a minority which so captures the media's attention.

You have almost zero chance of being killed by a refugee in America. You have almost no chance of being killed in a terrorist attack by an immigrant - by any kind of immigrant, let alone an Islamic immigrant.

Obama has been the single worst president in modern American history in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.

Anyone who says that Iran will commit suicide with its nuclear power is a moron and has no business in discussion.

Trump is a narcissistic sociopath; he's doing exactly what he said he would do.

There's this notion that Republicans are the party of Jesus and the Democrats are the Godless party. Let's be clear for a minute. One party wants to give health insurance to the poor and the weak and the dispossessed, and one party wants to take away that health insurance and give tax breaks to rich people. You tell me: which side would Jesus fall on that argument?

It is no exaggeration to say that Syria holds the key for nearly all of Americas foreign policy goals in the Middle East. As Syria goes, so goes the region.

When I was in the US, I felt that the discourse there surrounding Muslims as the other, problematising Muslims and Islam as the other was very similar to what we find in Australia, which is that the image of Islam is a constructed image in the West. We are starting from a point of view that Islam and Muslims - well Islam is a violent, misogynistic, hateful religion and that is where the debate always starts from - that presumption underlies the discourse.

Is it possible that Jesus, unlike 98 percent of his fellow Jews, was literate and educated? Yes, it's possible.

My biography of Jesus is probably the first popular biography that does not use the New Testament as its primary source material.

The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it.

A cosmic war is like a ritual drama in which participants act out on Earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in the heavens.

Many of the prophets of Jesus's time were thought to just be mad men, just sort of crazy people who were claiming to channel the divine. Perhaps that means we should be a little less judgmental of some of our own crazies talking about God on the corner. They might actually have found a pretty comfortable place in Jesus's time.